Hope of life for death row inmates

MORE than 3000 US prisoners condemned to die by lethal injection have been given new hope of life by a US Supreme Court ruling on Monday.

Clarence Hill, a Florida death-row inmate, was granted leave to appeal against his execution on the grounds that the chemicals in the injection could cause him unnecessary pain and therefore violate his constitutional rights. In the 38 states that practise lethal injection, some 3360 inmates on death row will now be able to appeal against their sentence.

The big question - one that the Supreme Court didn't rule on - is whether the triple cocktail of drugs used to kill prisoners actually causes pain. A study in The Lancet last year (vol 365, p 1412) concluded that many prisoners may have received too little anaesthetic to mask the pain of the injection that stops the heart, and in February an execution in California was ...

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